Ideas and Resources for Teaching Spanish and MFL from a Spanish Teacher using Mary Glasgow Magazines in her Classroom.

Avoiding Common Errors in Spanish: ‘to meet’ in Spanish with activities

By Maje

A Spanish version follows.

Hello everybody!

We hope you have had a great weekend!

During the past few weeks, I have been talking (a lot) about Spanish idioms, Spanish & Latin American vocabulary and Spanish grammar. And also about our online news articles! I love them because students can leave comments and that means we get to know the most common mistakes speakers of other languages make in Spanish! I must confess that I truly enjoy collecting them as knowing what they are is the first step to help students to overcome making mistakes.

As I teach Spanish in England and most of my students use English as their first language, I want to focus on common errors in Spanish by English speakers. How about ‘quedar’ and ‘encontrar’? My students always find it very difficult to use ‘to meet’ in Spanish. They are prone to using ‘encontrar’ all the time, avoiding ‘quedar’, which they confuse with ‘quedarse’. For that reason, I have created the infographic below. I hope it helps English speakers understand how we use these verbs in Spanish.

Complete the following sentences with the correct verb (and tense!) from the infographic above:

How do you correct errors in the classroom? This is an issue that matters for any MFL teacher! Do you use peer correction, self-correction or teacher correction? Reformulation, repetition, signposting, etc? What do you correct more: grammar, pronunciation, word order, etc? Looking forward to your comments.